Monday, October 22, 2007

The green line marks the path traveled by the New Horizons spacecraft as of 12:00 AM, Pacific Daylight Time, on October 22, 2007.  It is 784 million miles from Earth.
ABOVE: The green line marks the path traveled by the New Horizons spacecraft as of
12:00 AM, Pacific Daylight Time, on October 22, 2007. It is 784 million miles from
Earth. Click
here to view the official webpage showing where New Horizons is in
space. (AU stands for Astronomical Units, in case you're wondering.)


NEW HORIZONS Update... More than 21 months after launch, New Horizons continues to perform well as it travels at least 1 million miles per day on its way to Pluto. On June 8 of next year, New Horizons will cross the orbit of Saturn...and eventually take Cassini’s place as the most distant spacecraft that is currently at or heading towards its primary science target. For some interesting stats, it has been 640 days since New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006, 236 days since the Jupiter flyby on February 28, 2,728 days till Pluto close encounter operations begin on April 12, 2015 and 2,822 days till the closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. I got these factoids from the main website. Below are some notable photos that New Horizons took when it flew past Jupiter in February...

PIC 1: Jupiter looms prominently as Ganymede (whose shadow is cast near the gas giant's north pole) and Io (to the bottom) orbit to the right of it.  PIC 2: Europa emerges from behind Jupiter's disk.
PIC 1: A composite image of Europa (bottom left) and Io (upper right).  PIC 2: Another composite image of Jupiter and Io.
NASA / Johns Hopkins University - Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

NEW HORIZONS Blog Entries Archive:

September 26, 2005
December 19, 2005
January 7, 2006
January 17, 2006
January 19, 2006
April 12, 2006
June 15, 2006
February 27, 2007
October 22, 2007

No comments:

Post a Comment